Came up with a conversation with friends about Faction Paradox and metanarratives in Who, so I thought I’d blog that bit I’ve written about Class and its governors (full article here: https://downtime2017.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/tiberian-thoughts-the-fall-of-the-house-of-ness-notes-on-class-33/ )

"There’s one detail, however, that’s incredibly intriguing. We see the Heaven of the Arn, the Hell of the Lore, the Birth of the Quill Godess (interesting that we explore in quick succession three religious-themed vistas; it echoes, somehow, the form of the triptych, a threefold religious painting representing three scenes completing each other).But, before we get to the Cabinet of Souls, we stop by the inside of Coal Hill school – under a stage, because of course it’s under a stage. There’s of course an obvious, plot-driven answer: the Governors projected an hologram to make Quill more comfortable during her operation. But if you read more into it … That makes Coal Hill into a place of worship in and on itself, yet another religious scene. The Governors, from their little pocket dimension, seem to be worshipping the school. And that is fascinating – because what is Coal Hill, if not a physical representation of Who itself? It was there the show started, all the way back in 1963. It’s no coincidence if “The Day of the Doctor” opens there, or if Clara, the character that is destined to take the Who narrative into her own hands and ascend to the status of Doctor herself, works there. The Governors are Doctor Who fans. They’re just not very good fans – if we go back to “Love and Monsters” terminology, they are the polished, respectable spawn of Victor Kennedy. They are statisticians, analysts that deconstruct the show and its narrative in a bunch of numbers and factoids. Their agents are literal robots apparently incapable of speech. Dorothea, the only one showing anything resembling human emotion, gets killed fairly horrifically by her superiors. If Class is about the destruction and corruption of the Who narrative, then the Governors are the hidden, rotten heart of this corruption.""And of course – of course – they serve the Weeping Angels. That just makes too much sense. It’s easy to forget how meta a creation the Angels are – they’re not scary because they’re going to torture you; but because they are going to rewrite you, rewrite your story, deprive you of your agency. That’s why every single episode where they’re the key threat is centered around text (and by text, I mean “a piece of media”, not just a written one) – the script in “Blink“, the manuscript and surveillance footage in “Time of the Angels“, and of course Amy’s book in “The Angels Take Manhattan“. That’s also why some of the efforts to make them work in the Expanded Universe have failed so badly – “Fallen Angels” is an awful, awful, awful trainwreck, people, and you won’t convince me otherwise. What Class teases is a world where they are going to launch a full-scale attack against the Who narrative – where they are attempting of rewriting the show, starting with square one, Coal Hill School."

Or the one where I get uncomfortably personal and emotional about colonisation and its legacy.

But eh, I also talk about Proust and rituals and stuff?

A fun chrono-geographical parallel:

“It’s what your friend mistook for a ley line. (…) It’s part of the fabric of space-time itself. What DNA is to your genetic code, this stuff is to biodata. And it’s just exposed here now. Personality, history, memory, perception, all vulnerable. (…) It’s me.”

(…)

“Kyra said she’d been mapping these lines all over the city …”

(Kate Orman & Jon Blum, “Unnatural History”)

“Imagine if time all happened at once. Every moment of your life laid out around you like a city. Streets full of buildings made of days. The day you were born, the day you die. The day you fall in love, the day that love ends. A whole city built from triumph and heartbreak and boredom and laughter and cutting your toenails. It's the best place you will ever be.”

(Steven Moffat, “The Pilot”)